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Monthly Archives: April 2011

“The best way to define it is in terms of the offline consequences,” said Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of Stanford’s Impulse Control Disorders Clinic and author of the new book “Virtually You.” “Are we suffering in terms of our cognition and attention spans because of all the time we spend online? Is our professional life negatively impacted because of all the nonessential Internet surfing we do at work?” Too often,…

Short recalled a brief conversation she had with Chris Crawford at GDC in which he critiqued her and others interactive narrative games. “Youre not giving the player enough of a chance to respond; the game is doing all the talking and the player is doing all of the listening.”Said Short, “I assume what he wanted me to do was give the player more of a chance to respond, but being…

Sports journalism is full of colorful figures of speech, invented by writers who wanted to put a little variety into their writing. When given objective data about the game, a computer program has done a fairly good job of emulating sports lingo. The following story starts out by critiquing a sports news story that some skeptics assumed had been written by a machine. The writer of that story — it…

When her boyfriend gave her copy of a travel guide for Wilder buffs, McClure added an itinerary of pilgrimages throughout the Midwest to her holiday plans. None of the Ingalls family’s several houses remains standing, but there are reconstructions of the little house in the big woods, the sod house from “On the Banks of Plum Creek” and, of course, the little house on the prairie. The site for the…

Just finished listening to B. J. Harris narrate The Moonstone. The plot isn’t exactly rollicking, but I enjoyed the shifting narrators and in many paces Harris’s characterization of the fussy servant Betteredge made me laugh out loud. I really enjoy The Classic Tales Podcast, wherein Harris narrates about an hour of literature — a short story or part of a novel, or very rarely some poetry — each week, for…

The video clip on this page does not match the story, and there does not seem to be any way to post from my blog to the print version of the article. Looks like a silly attempt to control web visitors, in such a way as to prop up ABC’s slice of the dwindling TV empire. Though there’s a “play” button below the image, the clip plays automatically, and there…

Okay, I’ve posted enough of these to Twitter. Here are some more that I’ll leave here. That Can Be My Next Tweet reads your recent Twitter posts and mashes them up. These are probably only funny to me, but I’m chortling uncontrollably. Here are some more of the best ones. P. G. Wodehouse co-wrote the Microsoft Zune. That’s a few weeks, some Seton Hill faculty meetings. At the 70s, when…